Investors snapped up $31.2 billion of stock this year from U.S.-listed companies making their first share offerings since going public. That’s up 7% from $29.2 billion a year earlier and the highest year-to-date total since 2000 for first follow-on deals.

The market for U.S. companies that want to go public is the hottest it’s been since the tech boom.

So far this year 144 companies have gone public, a 71% surge from 84 at this time last year, according to Dealogic. This year’s pricings are the most since 2000, when 220 companies had gone public by this point in the year.

The White House is targeting overseas corporate-tax avoidance in its budget for fiscal 2015. President Obama will unveil a slew of proposals on March 4 that would, among other things, tighten rules for digital transactions that some companies design to limit the taxes they pay on certain income, the WSJ’s Damian Paletta and John D. McKinnon report. The proposals would also address the strategy of loading up on debt in U.S. operations—generating large deductions—and then using that capital to shift profits overseas. The changes would also make it more difficult for companies to arbitrage tax-rule differences between countries, such as one country’s treating a hybrid instrument as debt while another treats the same instrument as equity.

Capital-intensive companies could take a hit this year from the expiration of a popular tax break for equipment purchases. “Bonus depreciation,” one of the 55 so-called tax extenders that expired at the end of last year, has helped reduce corporate tax bills, particularly for energy, utility and industrial companies, writes CFOJ’s Emily Chasan. It has had a big impact on capital-spending patterns and corporate cash flows because it reduces the amount of taxes companies have to pay, David Zion, a tax and accounting analyst at ISI Group, said in a recent note to clients.

Audits are getting tougher. Financial executives say their external auditors are requesting far more documents and details than usual on everything from pension assets to management reviews, CFOJ’s Emily Chasan writes in today’s Marketplace section. It’s all because of the PCAOB’s warning in October that it had found “high levels of deficiencies” in audits of internal controls. Loretta Cangialosi, Pfizer’s controller, notes that the alert came just as companies were planning their year-end audits for 2013 and budgets for 2014. “They’re really focusing on the audits of internal controls,” she said.

A lukewarm environment for mergers and acquisitions encouraged companies to turn to the red-hot equity markets to shed units and raise capital. The number of IPO split-offs—those that raised capital—hit 14 last year, a post-financial-crisis high.

A bull market for IPOs is likely to continue into 2014, as investment bankers expect deals from technology, health-care and energy firms to boost the number of U.S. offerings by 9%, according to a survey from BDO USA.